Crytek's Yerli On The Future Of Gaming Graphics on Gamasutra shares some thoughts from Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli's GDC Europe keynote where he discusses the history of their engine development efforts and the future of game graphics. Here's a bit:

Talking trends, Yerli observed that GPUs and CPUs are "on a collision course", as CPUs get more parallel and GPUs -- already highly parallel -- are moving towards more general-purpose computing. He recommended OpenCL as a good base for addressing the issue.

In general, Crytek is trying to make all of its engines very scalable, due to the uncertainty about when the next-gen consoles might arrive. Yerli suggested that Crytek is estimating 2012 to 2013 for the next generation of home console hardware. But thanks to the success of the relatively horsepower-light Wii, "there's a big debate about whether there will be a next generation at all", he admitted.

The Crytek co-founder also discussed the dangers of the Uncanny Valley in work that companies -- even Crytek -- are doing. So he suggested most games use artistic styles, physics and AI to differentiate themselves, at least up to 2012 when the next generations may arrive.

Early visual style development is key, even now, he said. Procedural content development is also a heavy research area for Crytek, with Yerli saying that his dream is to create a game made by just a few people that looks like it was created by many more.